Connecting with God through poetic articulations of lived, embodied experience–engaging texts from the Revised Common Lectionary for Christian churches, other biblical and spiritual texts, and evocations of the divine in rituals and other public events–always accepting lived reality as a primary source of divine revelation and mystery.

Where We Must Go

A reflection in response to Proper 8, Sixth Sunday after Pentecost, Year C (click here for biblical texts)

Jesus set his face to go to Jerusalem knowing he had to go to fulfill his mission despite probable pain and rejection. Mission. A word we associate with missionaries going to foreign lands to spread Good News, to convert, at least teach others about Jesus, or to help with health and self-care among those whose worlds are filled not with science and modern learning but with age-old remedies and ways of being. Corporations and businesses have missions too, principles designed to express the values and purpose of the corporate culture, increase investment, inspire workers to new heights of achievement, more whole ways of toiling.

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Do you have a mission? Do I? Do we as the Body of Christ? If we set our collective face, even our individual, personal face, to go to the Jerusalem, the hard place in our lives, where would that be? Would we seek out the person we have not yet forgiven, be human and confess our sin in order to set us, the world, more free? Would we go, if we are white, to Baltimore or D.C. or Ferguson, to engage in hard work of undermining what white privilege has done, is doing, to our siblings in Christ? Or into corporate boardrooms to demand an end to ceilings, Black and Brown and glass? Or maybe all of us, regardless of color or origin to stand outside the Pentagon or White House demanding an end to nuclear arms and a beginning to fund, fully fund, programs to feed the hungry, or health care for all? Or if we are L,G,B, or T, do we bare our souls, maybe bodies, in places of the greatest hate and intolerance, go home to the small town we fled and proclaim our embodied joy, or perhaps sit in at a meeting of Catholic Bishops or the Southern Baptists to ask them not to talk to us but listen, just listen to the truths of our lives? Or stand somewhere, telling our government no walls, return no immigrants other than criminals, to open our hearts by the golden door to all in need of new starts, a reprieve from unrelenting violence in their own land. Must we not take in the widows, orphans, and sojourners in our midst? Is that not holy teaching?

We are not Jesus, or Elijah, you say, not needing to defeat the gods of Baal or of mighty Rome or even rules of the ancient temple. It is so, and yet, and yet, Baal walks among us in many forms, and our nation is perilously close to Rome despite our good intentions, our religious rules often not far removed from the law from which Paul told Galatians, and us, we were liberated. We cannot condemn Pharisees for short-sightedness when our own vision is small. Like those whom Jesus met on his way to Jerusalem we have many reasons to say “Okay, just not now.” Or we can, like disciples, threaten to destroy those from whom we feel rejected, but Jesus, Jesus of Easy Yoke and Hard Way, calls us to put hand to plow, set our jaw, with confidence in God if not joy, turn our face to the Jerusalem of our day, our life, whatever it may be, knowing, as it happened for Elisha as he followed heaven-bound Elijah, that the waters will part and we can go where we are called to go, where we must go.

About this poem . . . This is not an easy lectionary collection. Today’s gospel has hard sayings from Jesus, and the Hebrew accounts of Elijah and Elisha can seem too fantastic to our modern sensibilities, and even Paul, seeming to say flesh is bad in and of itself. And yet, there is through here, for me at least, a thread of engagement with the world, of being empowered and guided by divine forces to participate in co-creating the world God wants us to share.